Founding story
In 2012, Tiffany Henderson noticed something happening among the oldest students at Tiffany's Dance Academy in Livermore, California. The high schoolers were quietly running the place. They were leading warm-ups for the youngest classes. They were organizing fundraisers for community partners. They were mentoring eight-year-olds whose first ballet class they themselves had taken a decade earlier. None of it was on a syllabus.
Raising the Barre was founded that year to give that behavior a structure. The premise was simple: dancers who already had the discipline of class and the muscle memory of performance had built skills that translated — if you let them — into leadership, service, and self-direction. RTB existed to make that translation explicit, give it a pathway to scholarship money, and offer it to dancers across affiliated studios who weren't being recognized for the work they were already doing.
Over the next decade the program grew through partnership, not franchise. Independent dance studios across the country applied to open chapters. Today twenty-five chapters operate in thirteen states, each running RTB inside their own studio under a common framework: four pillars, seasonal participation requirements, and eligibility for a national scholarship fund.
The research arrived later. In 2022, with the help of UPenn's Liberal and Professional Studies and an active IRB protocol, data collection began on what dance class actually does to mood in children and adolescents. By 2025, Tiffany had completed her Master of Applied Positive Psychology at UPenn — in the program founded by Dr. Martin Seligman — and the manuscript was in submission. In June 2026, the paper was published in Frontiers in Psychology, and a second study launched at Stanford on executive function in young dancers.
What started as a way to honor what teenage dancers were already doing in their studios is now a research-backed nonprofit asking a quieter question: what is dance class actually for, and what does it do for the people who show up to it week after week?
